at the bottom of this guide you can find a bunch of extra tips about video drivers and other system tweaks which can help a lot in certain systems, make sure to read them if you have time

some cutting-edge distros run wayland by default. it's recommended that you log into xorg instead (most DE-s have an option at login to select X as your session). wayland is untested and will likely have a performance hit on osu as wine doesn't support it and needs to run though a xorg compatibility layer

install the newest wine version you can find for your distro, 3+ is recommended. if you're stuck with old 2.x versions you might wanna try 1.8 or 1.9 if you can get them

if your distro packages wine-staging, it's fine to use it as long as it's based on wine 3+. staging can help running other games better, but it didn't really affect osu for me. it's nice to have if you run games other than osu though

navigate to graphics and ensure that "allow the window manager to decorate the windows" and "allow the window manager to control the windows" are enabled. this can allow native fullscreen to work which can help performance on bloated desktop environments like gnome

optional: fixing japanese fonts

as discovered by _goeo, it's possible to fix both the top right icons in the main menu and japanese fonts by copying fonts from a windows install or iso.

if it's not, you better take note of where it's installing or click to change the location

if the updater gets stuck in a loop at the discord-rpc dll see section troubleshooting

osu will start up and start downloading the bundled beatmaps, let it finish, set it up however you like and check how it feels

don't worry if it's stuck with vsync, we will disable it with our launcher script. also see extras for more info on vsync tweaks

if you're on a fancy desktop environment with a compositor and effects, you might want to run in fullscreen (which should be the default). this will potentially bypass the compositor.

if you use multiple monitors and/or fullscreen isn't working well, you are forced to use window or borderless windowed. since window mode can suffer all kinds of performance issues because of desktop environments and their compositors, I recommend turning off your compositor or not using one at all. if you keep having poor performance or input lag, try a lightweight window manager like openbox, dwm, jwm, i3, or a de with no compositor like lxde

if you use a tiling window manager like dwm, fullscreen might not play well with it (freezes when you switch workspaces on dwm), so disable fullscreen which will make the game borderless fullscreen (unless you change resolution)

while the game is not running, open your osu!.user.cfg, and set the CustomFrameLimit to the highest fps your computer can handle stably. Note that osu! normally shows how many milliseconds it takes to render a frame instead of the fps in the "fps counter", so the math is
fps = 1000/(how many milliseconds it takes to render one frame)

if you get red X'es upon running the installer:

arch linux users have reported seeing red X'es on the osu installer / launcher. this seems to be caused by a broken or missing 32-bit libpng. try installing libpng (both the 32bit and 64bit versions) like so (this command is for arch, but the fix applies to all distros where this happens):

pacman -Sy lib32-libpng libpng

if it still doesn't work, check what version of libpng you have by doing

ls /usr/lib | grep libpng

then symlink it to libpng12.so.0 (replace libpng16.so with whatever version you have)

you can set this command to run at startup as explained in mouse acceleration.

touchscreensame configuration as huion tablets. my Asus VT168N is supported out of the box and shows up as "ELAN Touchscreen". all you have to do is use map-to-output as explained in the huion section and map it to itself.

calculating tablet area values

this is really simple maths and logic. Just read through the examples and you will get it.

let's say I wanted an area half the size of the full area in the top left corner with the same aspect ratio as the default area.

if you want to achieve the same effect as "forced proportions" you can calculate the aspect ratio of your monitor and use that instead of 1.78205128205 in the above calculations. The aspect ratio for 16:9, for example, is simply 16/9 = 1.77777777778.

wacom tablets

input-wacom has great support for wacom tablets

- arch:

sudo pacman -S xf86-input-wacom

- ubuntu:

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-wacom

- gentoo:

sudo emerge --ask x11-drivers/xf86-input-wacom

see "mapping wacom tablets to a subregion of the screen" to adjust the area

if you use a wacom tablet and you do not drag, you may notice that you go out of your tablet's range much easier than on windows. this is because of a tablet feature where it has two different states of being in proximity, and in range, in which the pen is still close enough that the tablet detects it but not as close as "in proximity". the current linux wacom drivers completely ignore this second state, and only update your pen's location if it's in proximity. but the maintainer of the linuxwacom project has done some work on it (i'm not sure if they're planning to merge it (perhaps as a setting) to the main driver), and this branch is the fixed driver where you can lift your pen as high as you could on windows.

if you don't want to remove pulseaudio you can always use pasuspender to temporarily stop pulseaudio while playing osu:

pasuspender -- osu

video drivers

for amd, the radeon open-source drivers are recommended. if you're feeling adventurous, you can try amdgpu. it has better vulkan support and better support for newer GPU's. it might have a performance hit on specific models though.

for nvidia, it's recommended to use the proprietary nvidia drivers.

for intel integrated graphics, the open-source drivers that ship with the kernel should be fine

if you have ubuntu, it's likely that the drivers installed by default will just work

to check that your driver is properly accelerating graphics, open a shell and run:

glxinfo | grep render

You should get something like (the important part being the first line):

if you have a 144hz monitor or any monitor that isn't 60Hz you will want to take advantage of that.

run this:

xrandr --output DVI-1 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 144

replace 1920x1080 with your resolution, 144 with your refresh rate and DVI-1 with your monitor's name from the xml file (or you can run xrandr to find out your monitor's name on other distros):

if xrandr is not installed, your package manager will have it for sure, so install it.

you can put this into your ~/.xinitrc to run it on startup

for ubuntu and mint you might also need to edit monitors.xml. open a terminal an run the following

nano ~/.config/monitors.xml

then identify the monitor on which you want to change the refreshrate (in my case DVI-1) and change the number in

<rate>60</rate>

to your desired refresh rate, then press CTRL+O to save, press enter to confirm and press CTRL+X to exit.

this will take effect after a reboot. you can also immediately change the refresh rate using the xrandr command above

lightboost for VG248QE

my vg248qe monitor support lightboost, which greatly reduces the amount of motion blur and pixel ghosting for fast moving objects. you can enable it with the following commands (only tested on the vg248qe, other monitors might have different modelines):

Last edited by Rori Vidi Veni2016-01-31T17:34:13+00:00, edited 1 time in total.

I ignored the polish o!m player FB group circlejerk blatantly going out after my posts.But now my posts are being deleted.Fuck this.I'm out of this mistimed, misinformed and mismanaged shit.

P.S. One of our standard world cup players admitted to taking drugs to enhance performance, and other was considering it. Depending on how long you keep chat logs, you may still have proof on your servers.

Rori Vidi Veni wrote:

Franc[e]sco wrote:

You can also use the open-source driver if you want, but the proprietary one usually outperforms it.

You have some very outdated info man. Now open AMD drivers are better because AMD actually hired people whose job is helping and contributing to them, and plans to make them into a base of a unified driver(the the closed source drivers will become optional plugins for the open one).

You'd be right for Nvidia though, IIRC they shared info with the open drive team exactly once in last decade.

thanks for the info, I'll try the radeon driver and report on performance in a bit then I don't know if lightboost will also work on that one though so I'm not sure I'll keep it even if it outperforms the proprietary one

UPDATE: I installed the open source ati driver and I'm getting the same performance as the proprietary drivers. Lightboost works as well. Nice.UPDATE2: Updated the guide to use open-source driver and added a section on how to enable lightboost.UPDATE3: Added pre-compiled winealsa.drv and tablet area instructionsUPDATE4: Added HUION / osu!tablet area instructions

First of all, thank you so much for this! I got this working pretty well but I am wondering how you capture osu's sound after it is sent to ALSA. I use obs for recordings so I can only capture from pulseaudio. I got osu playing through pulseaudio using a few hints from this guide but it crackles and changing the buffer size doesn't help. How did you capture your audio, Franc[e]sco?

SebDaMuffin wrote:

First of all, thank you so much for this! I got this working pretty well but I am wondering how you capture osu's sound after it is sent to ALSA. I use obs for recordings so I can only capture from pulseaudio. I got osu playing through pulseaudio using a few hints from this guide but it crackles and changing the buffer size doesn't help. How did you capture your audio, Franc[e]sco?

I modified winepulse.drv the same way I did with winealsa and changed wine to output the sound through pulse. I will update the guide with the modded driver soon.

Thanks again for this! I tested today with the winepulse alterations and I'm getting performance similar to what I get in windows, with no crackles so far. Sometimes the sound gets really distorted, even unrecognizable, in which case I have to restart pulseaudio to fix it (this used to happen in wine applications for me a while ago). This only seems to happen when I open new applications that use pulseaudio. Let me enumerate the problems you fixed for me . I can now record with obs, use hitsounds without changing my offset every time (makes mapping much easier), play hitsounded beatmaps, so I can re-enable effect sounds now (like the countdown and miss sound). Because I had a -130ms offset before, it messed with the AR of the first note on most maps and made getting a 300 on the first note really hard if there was no musical lead in. That's been remedied too I noticed you got some of your information from other sources but its the winepulse alterations that helped me, so here's another thank you from me, hopefully showing you how grateful I am I'll let you know if I find anything I can help with!

Very thorough guide! Great job. I have an issue though. After following all the steps, I was able to get it running, albeit < 100 fps. Using NVIDIA proprietary drivers. ( default open sources ones added a bit more fps but still unstable. ) I went to install the cutting edge ( after fighting with libgnutils forever ), and it finally updated. However, now I go to load it it up and I get no osu! I've tried running it via terminal and just double clicking the exe, but nothing comes up. I'm downloading gdiplus at the moment to see if that's an issue, but I doubt it. Any ideas on why the application just wont launch? Using Ubunutu 15 & wine 1.7.5

RaidMax wrote:

Very thorough guide! Great job. I have an issue though. After following all the steps, I was able to get it running, albeit < 100 fps. Using NVIDIA proprietary drivers. ( default open sources ones added a bit more fps but still unstable. ) I went to install the cutting edge ( after fighting with libgnutils forever ), and it finally updated. However, now I go to load it it up and I get no osu! I've tried running it via terminal and just double clicking the exe, but nothing comes up. I'm downloading gdiplus at the moment to see if that's an issue, but I doubt it. Any ideas on why the application just wont launch? Using Ubunutu 15 & wine 1.7.5

sounds like the driver isn't correctly installed or malfunctioning, you could try going back to the proprietary and selecting a newer or older version (there should be multiple binary drivers in additional drivers)

Thanks for the suggestions, I've tried several versions, all with the same issue. What's funny, is I downloaded a simple WIndows OpenGL benchmark application, and ran it through wine with no issues. Are you using the latest Cutting Edge version?

RaidMax wrote:

What's the process to put it in compatibility mode?

There's a checkbox in the options menu.

However I use the closed source nvidia drivers and note no difference with compatibility mode. I get 1k+ fps regardless. osu is perfectly playable for me now on linux because of the delay being fixed, but I've never had fps issues. I had a geforce 8800 gts before and switched to a gtx 660. I'm not sure what the problem would be here but I can report extremely good fps performance with the closed source driver and those 2 cards. Not that I think it matters much but I'm using wine staging 1.7.51 patched with Francesco's winepulse on arch linux and nvidia drivers 352.41. Working sweet on stock kernel 4.1.8 and ck kernel too. Also works fine on both beta and cutting edge release streams for me. Are you sure the wine prefix is setup correctly?

SebDaMuffin wrote:

RaidMax wrote:

What's the process to put it in compatibility mode?

There's a checkbox in the options menu.

However I use the closed source nvidia drivers and note no difference with compatibility mode. I get 1k+ fps regardless. osu is perfectly playable for me now on linux because of the delay being fixed, but I've never had fps issues. I had a geforce 8800 gts before and switched to a gtx 660. I'm not sure what the problem would be here but I can report extremely good fps performance with the closed source driver and those 2 cards. Not that I think it matters much but I'm using wine staging 1.7.51 patched with Francesco's winepulse on arch linux and nvidia drivers 352.41. Working sweet on stock kernel 4.1.8 and ck kernel too. Also works fine on both beta and cutting edge release streams for me. Are you sure the wine prefix is setup correctly?

I have about racked my brains trying to fix this issue. I really think it's the wine prefix, so I'm going to try deleting it and starting again. I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670. I locked 902 fps on windows, so I should be getting acceptable performance on here. Using nvidia-346 drivers and and 3.19.0-28-lowlatency for Ubuntu. I have literally done EVERYTHING to get OpenGL to see the 32bit libraries, so I really think it's wine. Will report back.